and
the bulged nets sweeping shoreward
With their silver-sided haul.
Every picture is full of color, and shows that true eye for Nature which
sees only what it ought, and that artistic memory which brings home
compositions and not catalogues. There is hardly a hill, rock, stream,
or sea-fronting headland in the neighborhood of his home that he has not
fondly remembered. Sometimes, we think, there is too much description,
the besetting sin of modern verse, which has substituted what should be
called wordy-painting for the old art of painting in a single word. The
essential character of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and the rush of
the lyric, like that of a brook, allows few pictures. Now and then there
may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery,
but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with
the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume
contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind.
"Skipper Ireson's Ride" we hold to be by long odds the best of modern
ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a
single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr.
Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite
grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine
poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the
end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is
pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton
Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad
English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited old pedant
contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on
this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble
to give us a tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common
enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful
gift.
This last volume has given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's
powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his
earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third
stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said
Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer
and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The
half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the Light" contrasts strangely, and,
we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of "From Perugia." The
years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer
quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the _rile_ has
quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr.
Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous
expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been
so true to the present.